Beam me up, Obama!

posted at 10:00 am on August 8, 2008 by Ed Morrissey

All hail the Obama Sign of Progress! US News reports on the latest for supporters of Barack Obama — a nifty little hand sign that allows his minions to identify each other in crowds. Apparently, the patchouli aroma wasn’t enough:

George Bush had his three-fingered W salute that supporters flashed when greeting him at presidential campaign events in 2000. And now, if a Los Angeles creative agency gets its way, Sen. Barack Obama will see fans meet him with his own salute like the one above. “Our goal is to see a crowd of 75,000 people at Obama’s nomination speech holding their hands above their heads, fingers laced together in support of a new direction for this country, a renewed hope, and acceptance of responsibility for our future,” says Rick Husong, owner of The Loyalty Inc.

Husong says that he came up with the idea after seeing an Obama-Progress poster, but it looks like he just spent to many nights watching Star Trek reruns. Take a look at this sequence from “The Way To Eden”:

As a ST-TOS afficianado, I have to say that they chose the absolute worst possible episode to lift. “The Way to Eden” is usually known as “The Hippie Episode”, in which Spock gets his groove on with aliens lifted directly off the streets of Haight-Ashbury, but only slightly more sober. It came during the more-or-less disastrous third season and attempted to display a “hipness” and relevance to contemporary times, and wound up embarrassing everyone, even its fans.

Now I can’t wait for the closing night of the Democratic convention at Invesco Field. The thought of 70,000 fans re-enacting a 40-year-old salute on cue has me already setting up my TiVo.

Update (AP): I didn’t get the Trek reference but I did see the resemblance to, er, another image referenced in InstaGlenn’s post, as will thousands of other web surfers who end up stumbling across the graphic. I can’t believe that any Obama supporter with enough Web savvy to try to spread this meme online wouldn’t have seen the backfire potential in designing an image reminiscent of goatse. Which is to say, this has to be a grand prank perpetrated by a McCain fan. I ran a search on Open Secrets for Rick Husong and Loyalty Creative to try to confirm that but came up empty. Anyone want to lend a hand in googling?

Update (Ed): Ugh … I didn’t even think about the goatse implications. Fortunately, the Boss has a better rendition of the signage, courtesy of one of her commenters: